"Yes," Deborah said. "An apartment actually, and the stairs are outside. And-so the story goes-there's a secret entrance to a hidden room in here somewhere, although where it could be is beyond me. Of course, as I said before, tales like that give the inn a little more mystique, a little more charm. They draw guests to a B and B, which, again, makes the place more valuable."

Deborah was doing her best to sell the inn. Sam jotted down another entry in her notebook, yet another reason for the owners to accept a much lower price: Ghosts? Although intriguing, they could scare off some guests.

Caroline pulled a box down from one of the stacks, opened it up, and she and Sam peered inside to find an endless number of old National Geographic magazines. "These are from back in the thirties." Caroline grinned. "So much has changed since then."

"Think they're worth anything?" Sam asked, making another note to check out the magazines on eBay to see what kind of prices sellers were getting.

"Depends on who's interested," Deborah stated. "I see them in antique stores quite often. They'd also look nice on the library shelves. Something for the inn's guests to peruse on a stormy day."

"Sam! Caroline!" Gracie called out from somewhere deep inside the carriage house. "Come see what I've found."

Squeezing through the boxes and inhaling mold and mildew and who knows what else, made breathing downright difficult. Sam coughed and sputtered as she followed Caroline and the sound of Gracie's voice.

Suddenly, Caroline stopped dead in her tracks. "Oh my!"

"What is it?" Sam asked, but Caroline and Gracie didn't need to answer. Over Caroline's shoulder, Sam saw it-an old car. A very big, old car.

Gracie tugged the cloth partially covering it the rest of the way off, revealing empty mousetraps atop the cherry red hood. The paint had been dulled by time, but Sam imagined it would shine bright with a lot of Turtle Wax. The person who'd stored the car must have known what they were doing, because it seemed to be in impeccable condition-no gashes or gouges and no apparent rust on the body, although there was no telling what it might look like underneath. "Does this come with the inn too?" Sam shouted back at Deborah, who hadn't ventured inside.

"Everything inside the inn, everything inside the carriage house, and everything on the property is part of the price."

Sam wondered if Deborah even knew there was an old car hidden away. The tires were flat, but with their wide white sidewalls, they looked original. There was no telling if the car would run, or if it even had an engine or anything at all under the hood, but what a find. Their dad had always loved old cars. He might have even ridden in or owned one like this once upon a time.

"Do you know what kind of car it is?" Sam whispered to Gracie and Caroline.

"Packard," Caroline said, using the hem of her shirt to rub away the built-up grime on the logo above the oversized front fender. "Can you see through the windows, Gracie? Does the upholstery look good?"

"The gla.s.s is a bit murky, but everything appears to be in good condition, even the leather upholstery."

"No rat nests?" Sam asked. "No other creatures living inside?"

"Not that I can see," Gracie said. If this car was in decent condition, Sam suspected it could finance a year's college tuition at a good school. If they bought the inn, there was no telling how much they could make selling off this, and a lot of the antiques. They could then furnish their B and B with pieces that would be easier to clean and would look fresh and up-to-date. But then the inn would lose too much of its charm. Its magic.

"Caroline! Sam! Gracie! I need to get going," Deborah called out to them. "Next time you can look till your heart's content, but right now, I need to lock up."

"Be there in just a minute," Sam hollered back. Next time. Somehow, Deborah seemed certain they would be back. And Sam was beginning to think that maybe she was right.

There must have been a hundred or more seagulls circling the docks when the ferry from Hyannis pulled into the harbor on Friday. From where Sam stood in the waiting area, she could see the pa.s.sengers packed in like sardines, eager to disembark after the hour-long ride from the mainland to the island. She was even more eager to hit the shops, the restaurants, and the beaches with Jamie.

As long as Jamie was up to it. She'd halfway expected her daughter to call last night, but she hadn't, and now she antic.i.p.ated a tearful reunion. If Cory had broken Jamie's heart, Sam just might have to hunt him down in Manhattan and wring his neck.

But for now, all Sam wanted to do was hug her daughter. Sam shaded her eyes with her right hand, watching the ferry's pa.s.sengers disembark. Slowly but surely, the crowd thinned, and at long last she spotted her daughter. Jamie was tall like her dad, the man who'd turned out to be far too controlling for Sam to stay married to. He'd disappeared from Jamie's life when she was barely a year old, and Sam had played mom and dad ever since.

Jamie's strawberry-blonde ponytail bounced up and down as she made her way off the ferry, carrying a duffel bag, a backpack slung over her shoulders, and wearing jeans and a fitted cotton top.

"Hey, Mom!"

Jamie had her arms around Sam in an instant. She dropped her duffel bag on the ground at her feet so she could use both arms. She hugged Sam extra tight. That's when Sam first heard Jamie sniff. She held her daughter out to arm's length and saw the tears in her red-rimmed eyes.

"Oh, honey, I knew something was wrong." Sam smoothed away Jamie's tears. "Let's get in the car, and you can tell me what it is."

Rather than head for their cottage, which was only a few blocks away, they rode in near silence for three miles and pulled into the parking lot at Dionis Beach. The early afternoon sky was a clear, breathtaking sapphire, and the silver sand was dotted with colorful towels and striped umbrellas. Children ran up and down the sh.o.r.e, and lifeguards in tall stands watched over the people playing in the surf. Arm in arm, they walked down to the sh.o.r.e, where the water was calm and they were sheltered by dunes.

Jamie sat at the base of a dune, where sea gra.s.s grew all around, and hugged her knees close to her. She looked out at the westerly sky and the colorful sails on the boats lazing on the water. Sam sat beside her, quiet, waiting for Jamie to open up.

"How's your research going?" Sam said to fill the silence.

Jamie acted as if she hadn't even heard. She was focused on the horizon.

"I called it quits with Cory yesterday," Jamie finally said.

That wasn't exactly what Sam had expected to hear, but she was relieved. Thrilled. Yet so, so sorry for her daughter's pain. "Want to tell me what happened?"

"It all seems rather trivial now."

"Breakups are never trivial, honey."

"Cory and I were supposed to get together for dinner the other night, but an hour before, he canceled. Apparently he'd been invited to a networking event with one of his friends from law school, and some people were going to be there from a firm he really wants to work for."

"I thought he had a job lined up?" Sam was fuzzy on the details, but she thought Jamie had said he would be working for a small firm after he pa.s.sed the bar.

"He does." Jamie pulled off her sandal and buried her toes in the sand. "But this is a big corporate firm with offices all over the world. Apparently if he got a job there, he could work on bigger, more important cases."

"And make more money." That seemed to be what motivated most of Cory's decisions, from what she'd seen.

"Exactly. And I guess I was just tired of coming last in his life. He a.s.sumed it was okay to cancel on me because I was less important than his career. I'd been feeling like that for a while, and this was just the last straw." Jamie turned her head and looked at her mom. "So last night, I told him we were finished."

"I'm sorry, honey." Sam tried to choose her words carefully. She didn't want to make Jamie feel any worse than she already did. "But I think you did the right thing."

Jamie nodded. "I can't believe I put up with everything for so long. He sometimes canceled on me to play handball with the guys, or forgot about our dates because he got so wrapped up in his studying. He criticized my apartment and the fact that I lived in Brooklyn over and over, and laughed about it in front of me and his friends. But the other night was the last straw.

"I'd been telling myself that things would get better once Cory pa.s.sed the bar, but the other day I realized things weren't going to get better."

"It must have been hard to do it."

"Sometimes the right thing is hard."

"That's true." Sam linked her arm through Jamie's and looked out at the ocean. "How'd you get to be so smart?"

"I always figured I'd been switched at birth," Jamie said, and laughed. Sam tossed a handful of sand at her.

"Just don't ever sell yourself short, Jamie. You deserve someone far, far better than Cory could ever dream of being. It's his loss that he didn't see that."

Jamie drew in a deep breath, and another tear slid down her face. "I know I did the right thing, Mom, but"-she let out a sigh-"it hurts. A lot."

"Then you've come to the right place. We'll have popcorn tonight, with loads of b.u.t.ter; we'll take a long walk on the beach. And Gracie insists we watch another Cary Grant movie tonight-Bringing Up Baby."

"Is that the one with Katharine Hepburn and the leopard?"

Sam nodded. "And Cary running around in Hepburn's silky nightgown. You've got to love a guy like that. One who can make you laugh."

"I definitely need a good laugh. Tomorrow morning I plan to wake up with a smile on my face, and Cory totally pushed out of my mind."

"Good, because tomorrow night we're going to a clambake, and if you're lucky, I might just take you out to see the most magical place on all of Nantucket."

Even though Jamie was intrigued by that comment, even though she asked questions, Sam didn't tell her anything about Misty Harbor Inn. Giving her something else to focus on was a good way to push Cory Lippincott straight out of Jamie's mind.

Caroline was in the kitchen when her niece walked in later that afternoon with her strawberry-blonde hair wrapped in a towel.

"Is that what I think it is?" Jamie asked.

"Sure is," Caroline said, taking a couple of dessert plates out of a cabinet and grabbing forks and napkins. "Your grandma's prune cake. I was dreaming about eating a piece and when I woke up this morning, your mom was here in the kitchen whipping it up."

Caroline cut into the dark, moist cake. The b.u.t.termilk glaze shimmered on top, and the scents of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice wrapped around her. She scooped up an extra-large piece, put it on a plate, and handed it to Jamie, along with a fork. "How about a big gla.s.s of milk too?"

Jamie tilted her head, studying Caroline. Caroline recognized the gesture. It was the same way she'd always a.n.a.lyzed anything she'd been curious about. "Mom must have told you I called it quits with Cory, but really, Aunt Caroline, I'm okay. You don't need to treat me extra special."

Caroline smiled warmly. She might have told her that that hadn't been her plan, but Sam and Gracie came bounding in the front door, their arms full of groceries.

"You aren't eating my cake already, are you?" Sam said, frowning when both Caroline and Jamie took their first bites. "I just bought ice cream to go with it and-"

"I know Grandma always served it with vanilla bean ice cream, Mom, but really, it's better all by itself."

"And if you skip the ice cream," Caroline added, "you can have seconds on the cake and not feel the least bit guilty."

"I don't think you should ever feel guilty about having seconds on dessert," Gracie stated. She opened the refrigerator and put away a half gallon of low-fat milk, a head of romaine, a bag of deep red tomatoes, as well as celery hearts and cuc.u.mbers. That meant they'd be eating salad tonight. Which also meant Caroline needed to eat maybe three pieces of cake. Salad, she'd always believed, was for rabbits.

"What's all this?" Jamie asked, as she picked up the Misty Harbor Inn sales flyer lying on the kitchen counter.

Gracie glared at Caroline for one short moment, once again raising her brow. "That, Jamie, is a sales flyer for the inn your Aunt Caroline wants to buy."

Jamie looked from Gracie to Caroline, frowning. "Really?"

"It would be a big venture," Sam said, cutting a slice of cake for Gracie and for herself, "and nothing's etched in stone yet. We don't know the first thing about permits, or financing-"

"There wouldn't have to be any financing," Caroline reminded Sam, "if we pooled our inheritance money." She glanced at Gracie. "Which is one very touchy subject at the moment."

"That's because I don't want to buy the inn," Gracie said. She picked up her plate and sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs in the living room, just across from the kitchen. Max was instantly at her side, his tongue hanging out in antic.i.p.ation. "Your mom and Aunt Caroline both think I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but I'm not sure I want to own an inn."

Jamie looked at the flyer again and scanned it quickly, and at long last Caroline saw Jamie's gaze hit the bottom line: the price. Jamie let out a long, high-pitched whistle. Her eyes were wide in disbelief when she looked from Caroline to her mother. "You can't seriously afford this place, can you?"

"Seriously?" Sam said. "Maybe. But we have to look at the whole picture first. Which reminds me." Sam opened her purse and pulled out a sealed envelope. Caroline could see the Deborah Greenleaf Realtor logo on the upper left-hand corner. "I picked up the construction estimates." Sam dropped the envelope on the counter and took a bite of cake.

Before Caroline could grab the envelope, Jamie said, "Construction estimates?" She picked up the flyer again and more carefully studied the colored pictures of the inn. "It says something here about it needing a little tender loving care. Why do I get the feeling 'a little' really means a lot?"

Gracie nodded. "It's run-down," she said. "Very run-down."

"It's not nearly as bad as Gracie says," Caroline stated, scooping up a second piece of cake and putting it on her plate before heading for a comfy chair in the living room. "A new roof, I'm guessing. Paint, wallpaper-"

"New electrical. New plumbing." Gracie shook her head and turned to Jamie. "Your mom and Caroline don't see the flaws."

"But I do, Gracie," Caroline said, pinching off a piece of cake and feeding it to Max, who'd just licked Gracie's plate clean. "I see every speck of dirt and dust. I felt every creak in the wood and every loose floorboard, but I also can see past all of that. I think you can too. You just don't want to admit it."

Gracie kicked off her flip-flops and curled her legs up on the sofa. "Okay, I admit it, I couldn't help but notice all the beautiful antiques and the stained gla.s.s, and maybe, if I were thirty-five again, maybe even forty, I'd consider going in on it with you and Sam. If Sam's even interested."

"I am. Most definitely."

"You are?" Jamie frowned. "It's a big house for three people."

"It's been an inn for over sixty years," Sam said. "It wouldn't be just our home, it would be a B and B too."

"But you'd have to work again," Jamie said, her eyes narrowed, her hair still wrapped in a towel. "I thought you were enjoying retirement."

"I have endless amounts of free time," Sam said, "It's something I've never had before, and as much as I hate to admit it, I feel useless. That's not a good thing at fifty-two." Caroline had been surprised when Sam announced she was planning to retire a few years back, but careful planning, saving wisely, and the alimony checks she'd received from her ex had allowed her to squirrel away more money than her sisters had realized. "I've got too many good years left to sit around doing nothing."

"You don't do nothing," Jamie said. "You cook. You cross-st.i.tch."

"Hobbies. I need something more to fill my days."

"What about the town house?" Jamie said. Caroline could see she was uncertain about the idea of giving up the house where she'd grown up.

"You've lived there since Jamie was little," Gracie said. "You couldn't possibly give it up."

"Why not?" Sam asked. "Jamie's not there any longer."

"I could never feel that way." Gracie looked aghast. "All of my memories of Art are in my home-our home. When I'm there, I can still feel him at my side. When I'm in the garden, I can see him pulling weeds or planting his beloved sunflowers. He painted the walls. He built the addition onto the back." She sighed heavily. "It's been my home since I moved away from Mom and Dad. I could never leave it."

"Aren't you all jumping the gun?" Jamie said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor. She fed the remnants of her piece of cake to Max. "I mean, do you even know how to run an inn? Shouldn't you think about that before deciding to buy the place? Right now all I see are two, maybe three women who think they can walk into that inn and have guests magically appear. You need a marketing plan."

"A restoration plan too," Sam added, "and restoration isn't cheap, believe you me, especially here in Nantucket. Of course, the costs for labor and material that I saw in the estimates could be inflated, and I don't know the first thing about the contractors who gave Deborah Greenleaf those prices. They could be high-end builders, when we could probably find someone who works more in the world of reality."

"Are you going to tell us how much the estimates are for?" Gracie asked. "Or do you plan on keeping that information to yourself?"

"Oh . . ." Sam shrugged, smiling uncomfortably. "I imagine we could very well double the sales price of the home before we were done. Depending on how much we'd want done."

Gracie coughed.

Jamie whistled.

Caroline groaned. She shut her eyes and sighed, seeing nothing but dollar signs twirling around and around. Would it really cost that much to make Mom's Misty Harbor dreams come true?

Is the Misty Harbor Inn the magical place you said you wanted to show me?" Jamie asked, stopping beside Sam to peek through the window of a Nantucket souvenir shop on Main Street. The sun was lower in the sky, and it had cooled off a bit after the midday heat, but the air was still warm and pleasant.

"That's the magical place, all right," Sam said. "I know the price seems high-"

"More like astronomical, Mom."

"That's pretty typical for Nantucket. Everything here's expensive, but it's beautiful, isn't it?"